OK you don’t need another sweatshirt or t-shirt. You have 7 varieties of caps. You have the windbreaker. The flag. The posters, the books. The marching band records. The foam finger. A Brutus costume. The “Muck Fichigan” pin. So what do you need? Some fine ideas from the alumni mag:

* The Fossil watch. Ok not that exotic. * The scarlet or gray blazer. Always in fashion. * The popcorn tin. (Hey Marion, how did you let this business slip to some company in Virginia? Marion is the popcorn capital of the world!) * The marching band miniatures. * Not one, but two varieties of Buckeye Coffee – Ohio State Varsity Blends or Drinkstorm. Particularly apropo for Seattle area residents like me. * Coffee cups and other pottery at Hartstone Pottery * A buckeye carpet. This would look great in the living room. * A buckeye park bench. And here is your living room furniture. * And a mural for the wall – won’t they wonder about our civilization 1000 years from now when they dig this up. * Buckeye Crunch cereal – the breakfast of true champions. * Or a trip to an exotic part of the world with a group of alums – Alumni Tours. Nothing says buckeye pride like a trip down the Nile.

Enjoy! And I will accept any and all of these for the holidays.

November is when championships are won. Latest BCS rankings up at fanblogs. OSU has a chance to sneak into an at-large BCS birth, but clearly has to win out. Another challenge this weekend with a good Northwestern team in town.

Related posts: A sop to buckeye fans, Fanblogs poll up

Not much reading in the last month due to Halloween. But I got a couple in:

* “Olympus by Dan Simmons”:amazon. Probably more enjoyable if you know greek myth and shakespeare inside and out. An ok tale. Still wishing that Dan would produce something like “Hyperion”:amazon again – the Shrike is one of the greatest beings in science fiction. * “Hot Property by Pat Choate”:amazon. Good retrospective of IP systems. I was uninformed about the large differences in patent systems across different countries, and how the patent systems in other lands are not designed to protect inventors as much as they are designed to further industrial policy. Made me a stronger supporter of ip protection. Not sure how I really feel about the nationalistic tone in the book, I’d like to see a more global view of IP policy.

* Really want to like Jotspot and Jotspot live as wikis have some really appealing features. But I tried to do a simple thing – family christmas lists - and gave up and went back to tadalists. Just less confusing clutter. From the experience I kind of wonder if, for personal and shared documents, wikis are a tweener. I find myself gravitating toward a very structured task specific service like tadalists, or a totally unstructured shared document like writely. But I remain entranced by TiddlyWiki * Anxious to try Dabble out. I’d love something with 20% of the power of Excel, but completely roamable. * Phil finds google maps for mobile devices. Great first attempt. * Memeorandum has found its way into my set of homepages. * Don’t know if Healthline is it, but someone is going to do a great consumer health resource service. * Haven’t had time to try last.fm but interested in better music recos. downloading now.

* OK I am late on this one, but MicrosoftMax is really really cool. I’ve seen a lot of photosharing apps, this one is as nice as they come. How odd that this isn’t featured as part of Windows Live. * MusicBrainz tagger. A fine tagger. I still am looking for something tho that will work in batch mode and a) migrate all my itunes ratings back into the root mp3 files and b) grab all the album artwork. Unattended batch mode is critical, I am not going to manually do this for 60Gig of music. * Via larkware, Amazoner – easy creation of affiliate links. Really need to do this next time I post book reviews. * Phil on flock. As he says it has a lot of rough edges but I admire the experimentation. * People are getting front row running on the mac mini. I will wait for a less hacked version. Could use this very soon tho. * Windows Vista calendar. Hmm. Hope this ties back to windows/office live somehow. I’d like an easy to use calendar but it has to roam. * Novell’s Netdrive for mapping an FTP server as a drive. Wow, first Novell software I’ve installed in like 10 years. Nice tho.

Advice for friends and family:

• If you have autorun turned on, turn it off, now.
• Never open any link sent to you by anyone on IM. Unless you know what you are doing.

• I tried to register ignitionlive.com but it was taken. i guess we can’t enter the new “live” era.
• I’m not saying MSFT has committed this error, but I like Joel’s definition of “the Marimba Phenomenon” – what happens when you spend more on PR and marketing than on development. “Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later.”
• Office Live sounds interesting – and I wonder if it isn’t a great boon for startups. By validating a hosted intranet offering, Microsoft is kick starting the market. If the Microsoft product isn’t a homerun, someone will fill the void.

Related posts: Software roundup 10/18, Software and service roundup, Software Roundup 10/5

Useful for perhaps photoing our halloween visitors – trail cameras

Related posts: Keeping your fingers, Head in a Jar

Gleaned these from the WSJ last week – published way too close to Halloween to be useful this year. Sites selling a more complete and deep set of home controllers than say x10 or smarthome:

* Homecontrols.com * asihome

• Top Web2.0 VCs – some of these guys are going to make a lot of money.
• Phil Bogle on the need for a more sophisticated economy for web2.0 services
• Everything Tom writes is worth reading

Phil on tagging and search history – “The race is on to push more and more browser state out into the cloud from the PC, and to more seamlessly blur browsing, tagging, and authoring.”

It shouldn’t be just browser state. All PC state should be moving into the cloud. Increasingly this is one of the top criteria I use to eval software.

At the sports economist – “A plan approved on Thursday by the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I Board of Directors would pay colleges up to $100,000 each if their athletes do particularly well in the classroom and a high percentage of them graduate every year.” Great, let’s set a higher bar for these kids, and continue to funnel money not to the kids but to the adults and institutions riding on their back.

• Phil makes the switch to a mac. I like my mac mini. don’t love it, but like it. wish it networked better with all my pcs – the fact that it doesn’t automount remote shares on reboot is sucky.
• Rich likes the Medusa headphones for gaming.
• 200 cd sony media center pc.
• intel cache technology to speed up boots – “The new cache utilizes NAND flash memory and boots from that instead of the hard drive.”

• Centeris launch.
• Brad quoted on small efficient startups.

Related post: Nice mention of JudysBook

Via scoble, charles’ blog. Brilliant guy. One of the people at MSFT I really miss working with. Wish your blog didn’t look like crap in firefox, charles. Other great MSFTees I see leaving via minimsft – hadi partovi and don gagne. Also great guys and also wish i had the chance to work with them again.